Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraq War in Retrospect

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a raised Protestant and practicing Episcopalian, has said in a recent interview that it would have been "immoral" for the U.S. not to have used military intervention in Iraq following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

Rumsfeld, who served as Secretary of Defense for both President Gerald Ford and President George W. Bush, believes that the controversial Iraq War, in which the U.S. moved troops into the Middle Eastern country in 2003, was a "just" decision.

"In an era where the lethality of weapons has grown and when you're dealing with a regime whose President is known as the 'Butcher of Baghdad' -- he had killed thousands of his own people, used chemical weapons against his neighbors, and had thumbed his nose at something like 17 United Nations resolutions -- a President doesn't have a large margin for error," Rumsfeld told RealClearReligion in a recent interview, referencing the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who was suspected of proliferating weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003.

Rumsfeld went on to say that it would have been "immoral" for the U.S. to not have gotten involved in Iraq following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, given the intelligence information at the time which led the U.S. to believe Hussein was building a chemical weapons arsenal.